Modeling Digital Literacy 1

More education. Less schooliness.

Modeling Digital Literacy 1

Scroll down and look at the right-hand column of this blog, and you’ll see two powerful new features that are themselves examples of the digital literacy we should be learning and teaching our kids.

I just learned them today. It took ten minutes.

The first is my del.icio.us online bookmark linkroll. It’s a list of all web articles and sites I’ve found noteworthy enough to save on my del.icio.us (online bookmarking tool) for future reference. Click on any link and you’ll read what I’ve found. Discerning, reflective readers will notice this leaves the 20th century “Let me lend you a book/copy an article/send you and email with the link of something worth reading” method of sharing ideas in the dust. This is called “social networking” and is a simple form of professional sharing that is here to stay. Those that don’t use it are far less informed than those who do–and this gives them advantages in the competitive 21st century employment world. Knowledge is power.

The second is my Diigo linkroll. It’s similar to the more popular del.icio.us, but has this added value: not only do you read web articles I’ve read, you also read selections from those articles that I’ve highlighted and annotated–and can add your own annotations as well.

These linkrolls will update daily as I add bookmarks; but you can always click on the del.icio.us or Diigo heading links to see my entire library of online bookmarks at my homepages on the respective sites. Again, discerning readers will see that this leaves the 20th century equivalent of printing web articles and putting them in a file (or, more likely, losing them in a paper mountain) in the dustbin of history as well.

This is the tip of the iceberg of how 21st century productivity differs from even five years ago. It demands the “fearless courage”–and reflective honesty–mentioned in my last post to face the obvious: a good school will equip its students with the most powerful literacy skills to compete in the 21st century. Most of these skills are no longer paper-and-ink–or even “My Documents”–based. Gutenberg is dying, and his was the paradigm in which we learned and competed. This won’t be the case for our students.

They need digital literacy skills–and literacy means not just reading the web, but producing with it.

The question is: If we teachers are not digitally literate ourselves, how can we become so? If we don’t, we’re not serving our students.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)